A strange and delightful thing happened this past week that’s helps restore a bit of my faith in humanity. Some background: I’m on the Board of Directors for Neighborhood House of Milwaukee, a fantastic community center in the Near West Side area of Milwaukee close to Marquette University. A couple of years ago, I helped them by designing and building a completely new website. I had wanted to integrate on-site donations, but didn’t have the bandwidth at the time. On Monday, April 29, I finally finished integrating on-site donations. And just in time too, as the system was about to get a big workout!
On Friday, May 3, my contact at Neighborhood House sent me the following email:
It seems all of a sudden Neighborhood House started receiving numerous donations out of the blue. Most from Massachusetts, but many other states as well. What was going on? It’d be a very strange scam that began with scammers giving us money first!
My first stop was looking at Google Analytics. I started in the Acquisition section of Google Analytics as I wanted to see where these visits were coming from. In the Treemaps section, I could plainly see that the site traffic driving donations was coming from the social media channel.
But which channel specifically? I drilled down to view the details for the social channel.
Ah ha! My first big lead. The traffic and donations were coming from Twitter. What on earth was going on?
Next, I decided to do a search on Twitter for “Neighborhood House of Milwaukee” to see if we were being mentioned. After a few minutes of digging, this tweet stood out:
After backtracking and looking at the tweets that led up to this one, it appears there was a bit of a flame war happening on Twitter between Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics fans during the NBA Semi-Finals. The argument was over which team had the worst fans. Instead of letting the conversation devolve any further, @SteveMerkle9 decided a better path was encouraging his fellow Celtics fans to take the high road and give to a worthy cause instead. That cause, of course, being Neighborhood House of Milwaukee!
When the dust had settled at the end of the day, 57 individuals donated nearly $1500! While I wouldn’t exactly say that donations to Neighborhood House went viral, it was a truly impressive display of generosity facilitated by some very big-hearted Boston Celtics fans. Donations like these are so important to organizations like Neighborhood House and they are very appreciated.
If you’re inspired to give to Neighborhood House of Milwaukee, I know they will put it to good use in the community. To donate, go to http://neighborhoodhousemke.org/donate.